Dad's rhetoric to remind us what wanted to hurt us, to keep us in our beds at night, shivering together like rabbits about to be strung upside down by the legs, their spines severed in half.

"Then what happened?" Your Uncle would say and his voice, always diplomatic, always demanding, would be the largest it's ever been. He had been no more than eight.

A tawny-headed boy with a gape tooth who thought the surface of a lake was clear enough to look into and see himself. Like the compact mirror in our mothers' purse. Once he flooded the sink to get the same effect, but the water that came through the pipes to our old two story looked like it had been swirled with cream, opaque and he had to drain the water disappointed.

Dad would clear his throat to give Charlie an alternate ending, one in which our antagonist, the man who ran over the young woman with his car was able to have a family and relieve his guilt in church to God. Satisfied, Charlie would lean back to press his shoulders squarely into the car cushions of the backseat with a smirk that strung up his face in a weird way, like he didn't know it was even there. I remember the lights of the freeway overheads, streaking across his expression and dividing into visible parts.

"He dies under that car in the snow. He freezes to death, Charlie. He kills that woman when he hits her and takes her glasses, bloody but the lens still in tact in their bent frames," I recited, even as Charlie's fist met my stomach, finding the tenderness there and pressing it back into my spine, "Years later, the biggest blizzard ever hits Syracuse, and he has to stop to change his tire or else he'll have to wait it out and he is in a hurry to get to the bar. Wait it out? Not when the game was on."

Charlie wailed and wailed and wailed that time, like his screeches would make me stop, but his voice had long been something long transformed into white noise. At that age, it was duty of the oldest sibling to enact terror, no matter the circumstances From the drivers' seat, dad's hand reaches back to nab the edge of my shirt, tugging fiercely to close my mouth, but halfway through a story and I couldn't stop. "He left the glasses on the dashboard to remind him of what he had done and just as he is nearly done with the tire, truck weighs down unbelievably too heavy on the jack, unstable on the ice. The truck lands on top of him." I smack my palms together loud in Charlie's face, who has the mind enough to bite down on my hand, dangled in front of him like thanksgiving turkey to a frenzied rottweiler.

I often wondered that if Charlie had the intention, if he could to unhinge his jaw and eat me like a snake, cracking my bones on the way down and my knees protruding in his chest cavity.

As I wrenched my hand from his mouth, I finished, "It severs him into two and as he waits for his upper half to freeze, he sees a glint of glasses lens in the snow ahead, suspended on a body, watching and waiting."

Charlie had dissolved into even and slow sobs, the kind dedicated to crocodile tears and he shakes his head soft, as Dad dictated the punishment, cutting through the relative silence I'd blanketed the car in.

When he finished, Charlie had found his simper again, and in a even tone, the kind that didn't waver he told me, "I will kill you someday." It was something he said to me often, especially after Dad's stories and after I ruined something he loved.

“I could hear my heart beating. I could hear everyone's heart. I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark.”